This article was submitted by supporters of Julian Assange:
When Trump was elected, former CIA Director, now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that crushing WikiLeaks was the primary goal of the new US administration, thus indicating that freedom of the press was under attack by the US Government.
That revenge is evidenced by a leaked email released by WikiLeaks showing CIA security contractor Stratford had plans to move Mr Assange “from country to country to face various charges for the next 25 years. But seize everything he and his family own to include every person linked to WikiLeaks”. (1)
In 2012 Mr Assange received asylum in the Ecuador Embassy because he rightly suspected that the US was trying to render him to the United States. Swedish prosecutors had tried to develop a case based on a premise they had no evidence for, in order to get Mr Assange to agree to fly to Sweden to answer questions. The case was shut and opened three times and the UK Crown Prosecutions Service emailed the Swedish prosecutors not to come to the UK to interview Mr Assange in the Embassy and “not to get cold feet”.(2)
This is the elephant in the room; exactly the situation journalism finds itself in; as Mr Assange fights for his life and his freedom, as the current administration of Donald Trump pursues Mr Assange’s extradition to the US to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act, carrying a combined sentence of 175 years jail. In its first 10 years, WikiLeaks released 10 million documents to the public eye, a colossal trove of information about what our governments and corporations are up to behind our backs. News organisations made millions from the material, informing their readers of secret bank accounts from The Panama Papers, the war crimes of Iraq and Afghan War Logs and Collateral Murder video, what countries are plotting from the Diplomatic Cables, and evidence of ecocide and corruption.
What the US administration is actively seeking is the suppression of news, the criminalisation of journalism and a transnational reach which brings any citizen of the world under the jurisdiction of the US, yet without the protections of the US Constitution, as US lawyers are arguing in Mr Assange’s extradition hearing that the Constitutional rights do not apply to non-American citizens.
Why aren’t we talking about it? What does the show trial to extradite Julian Assange say about the man and his work? The most powerful government in the world seeks to jail for 3 lifetimes the most famous publisher in the world, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and multiple journalism award winner.
Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks on the model of open source journalism, in which the public could see classified information from powerful institutions – the proof – for themselves. It is a not-for-profit model that garnered huge support.
UNN fully supports the release of Julian Assange.
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